Kelly inquiry may be live on British TV!

[T_i_B]

Roll up Roll up! The greatest show on Earth live from Westminster! :eyes:

http://politics.guardian.co.uk/kelly/story/0,13747,1004343,00.html

Tony Blair was faced with the prospect of a long, hot and troubled summer today, as it was reported that Lord Hutton has requested that his judicial inquiry into the death of David Kelly be broadcast live on TV.

The investigation, which is expected to last around two months, is already likely to take evidence from the Mr Blair, his director of communications, Alastair Campbell, and the defence secretary, Geoff Hoon.

Lord Hutton, who was appointed on Monday to head the inquiry, has already stated he wants to take most evidence "in public", but transmitting testimonies live raises the stakes still further.

The prospect of daily live broadcasts of the inquiry - which would still require the participation and interest of the BBC and commercial broadcasters - will inevitably keep the suicide of Dr Kelly, and the government's whole case for a war in Iraq, on the front pages through the summer recess of parliament.

[RedSock]

1. cool -- more info from this blog

http://xymphora.blogspot.com/


Unfortunately for Blair, the BBC's Andrew Gilligan kept the contemporaneous notes of his interview with Kelly on an 'electronic device', which has been kept under lock and key (good idea!) and will be available for the inquiry. Gilligan also later confirmed with Kelly which quotes he could use in his report. Even worse for Blair, Kelly also talked to two other BBC reporters, and one of them taped the conversation in which Kelly said that Blair's office was 'desperate' for information and had exaggerated 'out of all proportion' the claim that Iraq could launch weapons of mass destruction within 45 minutes. A BBC spokesman said:

"We do have a tape but it's only a small part of our evidence for the inquiry. We don't want to go into too much detail of our evidence before the inquiry starts."

This looks like it is going to be fun. ...

David Kelly was a practising member of the Baha'i Faith, a religion with a strong prohibition against suicide.

*****

Bold words are these links:

http://media.guardian.co.uk/broadcast/story/0,7493,1003594,00.html
http://politics.guardian.co.uk/kelly/story/0,13747,1004165,00.html
http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/politics/story.jsp?story=426811
http://news.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2003/07/19/nhunt19.xml
http://www.thescotsman.co.uk/politics.cfm?id=788752003

although the last one doesn't work for me.

[T_i_B]

2. Thanks for the links!

:-)

[Cha]

3. I know! The suicide and the "faith" thing just don't jibe!

I don't belong to any religion and suicide is against my faith, too!

Unless something was mentally wrong with Dr.Kelly that we know nothing about...I don't see suicide as an option for him.

[reorg]

6. i agree

- it is totally irresponsible by some in the media to report Dr. Kelly's death as a suicide. The BBC are carefully avoiding this. Others put the term in quotes. My personal suspicion is that he was murdered - to set an example for what whistleblowers have to expect.

On the other hand - there is one scenario I could imagine which might suggest a reasonable motive for suicide: IF Dr. Kelly was pressured by the MoD to retract everything that would indicate he actually made the statements quoted by Gilligans and Watts or else face charges of treason. This is highly speculative, since I have no idea on what legal basis such threats could have been made. A careful reading of his testimony before the FAC reveals, however, that he failed to deny everything.

He gave some evasive answers, denied some circumstantial details, but stuck to the basic allegation that there was only a 30% chance that Iraq had any WMD left, that the "45 minute" claim was highly dubious, and was not checked with high level experts such as himself.

[Name removed]

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[NYC]

5. I sincerely hope this is televised live.

People need to know what is really going on.